Friday, May 18, 2012

Climateer Quote of the Day: Facebook Edition (FB)

Actually more than just a quote.
Here's The Atlantic:'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'

To help make sense of the Facebook IPO, we caught up with Steve Blank,
a professor at Berkeley and Stanford and serial entrepreneur from
Silicon Valley. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

THOMPSON: What does the Facebook IPO mean for Silicon Valley?BLANK:
I think it's the beginning of the end of the valley as we know it.
Silicon Valley historically would invest in science, and technology,
and, you know, actual silicon. If you were a good VC you could make $100
million. Now there's a new pattern created by two big ideas. First, for
the first time ever, you have computer devices, mobile and tablet
especially, in the hands of billions of people. Second is that we are
moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face, and we're
doing them on a computer.
And this trend has just begun. If you
think Facebook is the end, ask MySpace. Art, entertainment, everything
you can imagine in life is moving to computers. Companies like Facebook
for the first time can get total markets approaching the entire
population.

THOMPSON: That all sounds pretty good for Facebook, actually.BLANK: For Facebook, it's spectacular. But Silicon Valley is screwed as we know it.
If
I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay
me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in
two years, what do you think I'm going to pick? If you're a VC firm,
you're tossing out your life science division. All of that stuff is hard
and the returns take forever. Look at social media. It's not hard,
because of the two forces I just described, and the returns are quick.

THOMPSON:
Half the tech and innovation world seems to think this is just evidence
that we're in the middle of a dot-com remix. You disagree?BLANK:
In the last bubble, venture capitalists went into a frenzy if anything
had an ear and eye. I don't think this a bubble. I think the valuations
are a bit of a bubble, but social media is real.

THOMPSON: Is Facebook worth $100 billion?BLANK:
In the last bubble there were no customers. Facebook makes $4 per user.
The users are customers. They produce real revenue. Nobody's debating
whether Facebook can make money. They're debating how much more valuable
Facebook's hundreds of millions of users can be, and how fast can they
can grow that value. That's an execution problem....MORE